More on my fiction writing

October 05, 2018

Brains, trains, and automobiles

The biggest local story of the week is the unanimous (!) decision by the Rump City Council to raid funding intended for light-rail extension to Paradise Valley Mall and use it for street maintenance. As disheartening is that, as far as I know, neither major candidate for mayor has spoken out against it.

This comes soon after the Council (6-2) bucked an aggressive astroturf campaign by the Koch interests to kill that south Phoenix light-rail line (yes, the Wichita billionaires are deeply involved in destroying local transit). One step up and one step back. What's going on? A few observations:

The Council has changed from the consensus of the 2000s that brought some of the most constructive measures in decades. These include light rail (WBIYB), the downtown ASU campus, T-Gen and the downtown biomedical campus, and the new convention center. In recent years, the Council is less visionary and more divided — a situation made more difficult by the departure of Mayor Greg Stanton, and mayoral candidates Kate Gallego and Daniel Valenzuela.

Phoenix's size and means are wildly unbalanced. The Arizona Republic reported that city staff estimated that "4,085 of the city's 4,863 miles of streets will fall below a ‘good’ quality level in the next five years and require maintenance. Currently, 3,227 miles are already in fair, poor, or very poor condition. Bringing all of the streets up to a 'good' level in five years would cost $1.6 billion that the city does not have."

We can unpack this several ways.

At 519 square miles, the city runs an astonishing 47 miles north-to-south. Phoenix goes beyond Anthem to the north (it would never annex it because of the costs associated with weak infrastructure in the Del Webb sprawlburb). To the east, Phoenix actually crosses Scottsdale Road between Thunderbird and Jomax. The westernmost section of the city limits touches the Agua Fria River.

As I've written before, aggressive annexation was intended to keep Phoenix from the fate of suburb-encircled Midwestern and Eastern cities. Encirclement happened anyway, and the strategy brought unintended consequences. One of which is the cost of maintaining such an enormous chunk of geography. Philadelphia, the nation's sixth-largest city and edged from fifth place by Phoenix, has 143 square miles. Seattle is 84 square miles.

On the other hand, Houston, the fourth-largest city, sprawls out over 600 miles (I'm using land miles). Its fiscal 2018 operating budget is $2.38 billion. This compares with approximately $1.2 billion for Phoenix. These are not entirely apples-to-apples comparisons. Cities have other budgets, too. But the overall impression from studying these and other municipal budgets in peer cities shows Phoenix suffers a big disconnect between funding and needs.

Phoenix's economic base isn't what it once was, either. It punches well below its weight compared with peer cities, even smaller ones such as Austin, Denver, and Seattle. Until the 1990s, the city held the commanding heights. Since then, companies and jobs have migrated to the suburbs. This is especially true of higher-end assets going to Scottsdale, Tempe, and Chandler. Mesa, with a population larger than St. Louis, Cincinnati, or Minneapolis, exports most of its workers to jobs in other suburbs. It would be interesting to know how Phoenix stands now.

Annexation's logic was to gain sales taxes, a critical source of funding. But events are showing that the carrying costs of this enormous agglomeration are higher than the benefits.

De-annexation won't work. Some of my urbanist Facebook friends have wondered about this. On first glance, it's appealing. Cut the city's northern boundary back to Northern Avenue. Maybe even withdraw to 43rd Avenue on the west side.

It could create a dense, transit-centric city in the heart of the well-watered Salt River Project. And that might work if Phoenix had the economic assets of a Seattle — major tech headquarters, high-end offices of Bay Area tech giants, other big HQs, and a diverse, well-paying economy.

Unfortunately, Phoenix lacks these necessary elements. It depends heavily on Desert Ridge and the Kierland area for revenues — those would be lost — while much of the city remaining after de-annexation would be very poor and Hispanic, in the worst schools and facing the least economic mobility.

The areas north of Northern would probably be happy to separate. Cutting off Maryvale, however, would be an act of grave injustice. And how would Phoenix be reinbursed for its sunk costs in the vast lands to be de-annexed? You can bet the wealthier Anglo separatists wouldn't pay. So Phoenix is stuck with its size. But a fraught political battle involves competition between the blue suburbs within the city limits and the redder old city.

Opposition and magical thinking. Light rail's success did not win converts outside central Phoenix, Tempe, and the core of Mesa. This was the opposite of the experience in Dallas, which now has the largest light-rail network in the country. Instead, suburbs such as Scottsdale, Glendale, and Chandler doubled down on their hatred of "the trolley." When I gave a speech in Scottsdale in 2007 advocating light rail, a man in the audience threatened to shoot me.

To be sure, light rail is only one node the metro area needs. It also needs commuter trains and Amtrak.

In Seattle, a very high percentage of the population uses transit, especially high-earners. In Phoenix, aside from ASU students and peak-ride times, the trains are heavily used by the poor. This further reduces political support for the system. Opponents claim light-rail brings crime, when the reality is that criminals prefer to drive.

Opponents ply fictions, such as how ride services such as Uber can replace transit. In fact, studies and common sense show that they only increase traffic congestion. They say light-rail will be overtaken by Elon Musk's super-duper subway — as if Phoenix could afford it in the highly unlikely event it became a reality. Unfortunately, the uninformed are easily bamboozled.

The reality remains that we have to get people out of cars if we stand a chance of reducing carbon emissions. The most talented workers choose cities with good transit. Yet now Phoenix is at a dangerous moment where political leaders will further abandon a quality future.

Phoenix is hamstrung by this perpetual chicken vs egg problem where a relatively weak employment base in its core doesn't need transit to connect suburbs to its Potemkin downtown. What we see instead is the decentralization of employment hubs to the suburbs. Dallas, of course, has a very strong employment base downtown so its light rail system works as designed.

Phoenix is defined and circumscribed by a tragedy of time. It was a small city in 1950 that by 1970 had leapfrogged its former footprint in order to simply create another more auto-friendly downtown on North Central. From that point forward, there was no way to reconcile the one with the other. A fortune in public/private investment was poured into old downtown subsequently but the promised reinvention couldn't compensate for the original fissure. By 1990, high-end office projects were headed east down Camelback Road to Scottsdale.

LA was able to rescue its downtown partly because it had wealthy stewards like Eli Broad, and partly on account of its more benign climate. Most importantly, LA is a world city with thousands of "creative class" types craving an urban experience. You see aspects of this phenomenon in downtown Phoenix, too, albeit on a much reduced scale. LA is connecting its vibrant west side to downtown via the red line subway, and it already has a subway going to North Hollywood, and light rail in several directions. The centripetal energy that seemed to sap LA's urbanism now appears spent.

Will Phoenix ever arrive at this point? I tend to doubt it because it's simply too damn hot. Getting people out of their cars will always be difficult in an extreme climate. Worse,the political climate is still too extreme to ever allow future growth to be channeled toward downtown. Phoenix is a satellite of LA now and its immediate destiny is to be that of a second-tier city with cheaper houses and less traffic congestion. Its long-term destiny remains grim, needless to say.

I live near PV Mall and I can tell you that it is circling the drain -- numerous empty storefronts, sparse traffic, and anchored by dinosaurs Sears, JC Penney, and Dillards. The parking lot is mostly empty on most days, and its cracked, decaying asphalt tells you all you need to know.

One former retail space is now inhabited by a goofy golf course with black lights. I am not making this up.

Retail has passed on to Amazon and Kierland and the Scottsdale Quarter (with fashionable outlets such as Apple and Design Beyond Reach).

Why the heck would you want light rail to terminate at PV Mall? It's a corpse.

However, the impending shutdown of the mall by the Macerich Company, when it decides to throw in the towel (soon) presents an opportunity. It is a large slice of real estate. What could go there to replace the mall? Could it be something that exploits a rail connection to Downtown? Imaginative thinking needed! A creative solution could not only benefit both trans-Phoenix Mountains Phoenix but Downtown. You could make money on this.

Jon, stop dreaming this small town is going to be big time- it never was as big as it seems because retirees do not really count as a dynamic part of a population.

All of Arizona is weighed down with this reality- the folks who came for the sun don't spin out ideas for Intel, and they have moved on...

Even back in the day, Silicon Valley was much more dynamic, because it was where the future was being created- and our desert is where they stuck the fabs when land went sky high and the workforce costs became uneconomical. After all, has Albuquerque boomed as part of the Silicon Desert- even with Los Alamos right up the road?

Reality dictates Phoenix is just a big Sun City, with the slums generating the service workers. Landscapers, masons, etc. Care homes are a booming growth industry- with large houses now being bought to split into a large elderly group home- many with hospital beds discretely tucked into those master suites...amazing what is going on.

Now, why in the world would the creative class show up here? There is no money here. Without the sillycon valley startup mosh pit of money, we are a desert.

Money, it all comes down to money. LA had the ports, oil, manufacturing, etc. We forget how much industrialization used to exist in LA, and it was 20x what existed in the Valley.

So, given that head start, Phoenix is simply a retirement suburb, with the major employer now retail and healthcare.

And to think it will mythically reinvent itself is to ignore where the money comes from today- and where it is going tomorrow.

Face it, we are still in the hangover phase from the prior boom, and now we are unprepared for another downturn.

Phoenix has never been a mass transit town. I used the bus system extensively until I finished high school (Phoenix Union) in 1963, taking the #3 East Van Buren bus twice a day to and from school. The bus system ran frequent buses during the student-transport times but the rest of the time it was once an hour. You transferred buses downtown but due to the scheduling of most lines, it could take you several hours each way. So, people didn't think of using the bus because it was so inconvenient, and waiting in 110 degree sun for a bus didn't make the buses attractive, either, although the bus company bought new, comfortable air conditioned buses. The result was that often there was a car for each working adult in a household. This way of life went on for a long, long time. I wonder if it will take a generation or two for people to seriously consider public transit when car transit is so ingrained.

The problem with light rail in Phoenix is that it lacks any elevated sections that would allow the train to travel at a high rate of speed (upto 55 mph). But, this is a symptom of a much larger issue.

Other major cities have already built out their freeway network, particularly the loop along their metropolitan periphery. Phoenix is only now finishing up its freeway system. This allowed other counties in other states to focus more on transit funding than Maricopa County.

There is a large discrepancy in the transit tax rates between metro areas. Dallas collects a whopping 1% sales tax dedicated solely to transit whereas Maricopa County dedicates a small fraction of its 0.5% sales tax towards transit.

Perhaps in the future, Maricopa County will dedicate a larger percentage of its transportation sales tax towards transit when it comes time to renew its sales tax.